It is with remarkable prescience that Uma Nada-Rajah’s political farce has opened at the same time as the Tory leadership campaign. Just as Sunak and Truss vie to outdo each other with right-wing awfulness, so fictional home secretary Asiya Rao (Aryana Ramkhalawon) angles to take the top job from a lame-duck prime minster by seeming as intolerant as possible. The playwright could have written it yesterday.
With an eye for a photo opp, Asiya has turned up at the white cliffs of Dover to launch an anti-immigration policy yet more cruel than the last one. I’m loth to mention her Project Womb, a plan to shield the UK behind a wall of radiation, in case it gives the current lot ideas.
Topicality, however, is not the only ingredient of satire. Nor even is justifiable anger. You also need a scenario that feels vaguely plausible, something painfully lacking in this flat-footed National Theatre of Scotland production which takes aim at Britain’s Brexit-era isolationism and misses badly. With targets as clumsily drawn as these, the satirical bite is toothless.
The home secretary’s publicity stunt is interrupted with a biblical flourish when a baby washes up, Moses-like, on the Dover shore. For no apparent reason, neither Asiya nor her Malcolm Tucker-like special adviser (Sophie Steer) is able to put the child into someone else’s care. Instead, they hide it in the minister’s designer handbag and take the train back to London. As you would.
If that seems hard to credit, it is no more so than the rest of this show. First, lifestyle journalist Tobi (Anna Russell-Martin) turns up for an unscheduled interview on the train. Then, asylum-seeking opera singer Haben (Habiba Saleh) agrees to play the minister’s mother with a script that whitewashes the reality of her immigrant experience.
Without a foundation in truth, the actors in Debbie Hannan’s production can only flail around. The farce that follows is not driven by an unstoppable logic but by a series of random events the characters choose to accept. They could just as easily refuse and it would make the plot mechanics less laboured if they did. The cartoon inconsistency leaves the playwright’s important stance against isolationism looking blunt and obvious.
At Traverse, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Then on tour until 21 September.
